Now, post-election, the Wisconsin congressman is blaming his Republican ticket loss with presidential contender Mitt Romney on a huge turnout of urban voters for President Obama.

With old Blue Eyes Lyin’ in the Rain, there’s always a “yes, but”, and here it is:

One flaw in that analysis may be that election results indicate the Romney-Ryan ticket didn’t exactly connect with the voters back in Janesville, either.

A struggling blue-collar manufacturing town of 63,575, Janesville lies on the eastern edge of Rock County, Wis., and unofficial election tabulations from the county clerk there show that only 37% of Ryan’s hometown neighbors voted for him and his running mate. Meanwhile, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden got 62% of the Janesville vote.

That’s right, P90X lost his own home town, which isn’t “urban” or blah or ni-clang or whatever other dog whistle he wants to use.

Also, too: his candidate for House conference chair, Tom Price, lost yesterday, probably because “urban” members of the House Republican caucus chose Cathy McMorris Rogers.

This is why the GOP is going to go off the electoral cliff – their “leaders” believe their own bullshit. They have no ability to self-correct, because if they did, they wouldn’t be Republicans. Keep fornicating with those fowls, conservatives.

Someone posted Ryan’s actual statement on how things worked out for him once his own hometowners finally figured out that he was a Republican. It was the most unconciously funny thing you will read about this election. Using words a third grader might choose he stumbled through saying, but not saying, that when your good country friends realize you are a Republican, because you ran on the Republican ticket and you couldn’t hide it anymore, they hate your guts.

So Romney and Ryan are saying they lost because too many blacks voted, and the rest of the GOP is saying they lost because they ran a shitty campaign. Fine. Let’s see if they ever figure out on their own that they lost because THEIR POLICIES SUCK.

What gets me about the “urban” vote comment is that implicit idea that “urban” vote is somehow illegitimate. That, you know, the “urban” vote should count for less. That it should count, I dunno, maybe as 3/5 of a “real” vote perhaps.

But maybe I’m just reading too much into what Representative Ryan is saying.

Sorry but no. What saved the House for the goopers was 2010. So many State Houses redistrcited in ways that assured GOP holding seats that it would have been a miracle to take the house.

Dem candidates for the House had a huge voter lead over GOP candidates. Had the 2008 districts still stood the Dems would have taken 40 seats. We have to look at a GOP built in advantage there for a decade yet. the Dems either peel a lot more voters way from the goopers or just find ways around the GOP Congress.

EDIT:@dr. bloor: I have to say I am intruged by your idea of nukes to peel away goopers – do you have a newsletter I could subscribe to? 8-{D

President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as “Delphi” to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities. That’s according to a four-hour briefing delivered to Republican state senators at the Georgia state Capitol last month.

I’m bracing myself to start hearing Delphi from the wingnuts in my life like I used to hear Alinsky.

“Well, as you know, Janesville is a very Democratic town, but I’m a Republican,” Ryan said in an interview with Janesville radio station WCLO. “But I’ve always done very well here, because more people saw me not as a Republican but just as a Janesville guy.”
“When you join a national ticket for a party, you become more seen as a Republican guy than necessarily a Janesville guy,” he continued. “So I think my image, or the thought people had in their minds of me once I joined the Republican ticket, was more ‘Paul Ryan, Republican,’ than ‘Paul Ryan, Janesville guy.'”

Enjoyed hearing the new talking points from the right wing realm in the teacher’s lounge yesterday. Surprise, surprise the Electoral College prevented Romney from winning. If EV’s were allocated by congressional district, the GooP would have won the Whiteman’s House. Also, too, 42 states have filed petitions to secede.
Counterpoints of gerrymandering, popular vote, voter suppression, and UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH were all hand waved away. Only their magical thinking is allowed. The end of the discussion came when their argument was summed up as if the way elections are resolved were completely different and different people showed up to vote the result would have been different. Conversation moved to weather which is a much more contested topic.
Also:
Is Bibi hoping the Obama Slamma is going to ignore his mid-east tantrum?

@Mark S.: Our county commissioners regularly talk about UN Agenda 21, it seems to be in connection with a plan to manage stormwater runoff and other routine environmental management concerns. I even saw a bumper sticker that said “Agenda 21 is Evil” or something. I think 27% of the country has clinically diagnosable paranoid schizophrenia.

@Schlemizel: Do you have any factual basis to backup your assertion on Gerrymanders because otherwise there is this from Jonathan Bernstein that is as contrary to your point.

@Bernard Finel: I am not sure Ryan was being cognitively racist even though the clip sounds like a dog whistle. He appears to be still living in his fact free delusion along with almost half the voting population. The concerning part isn’t the racism, we know racism is wide spread in the USA, it is Ryan’s inability to get the facts right. Whats the word for fact-phobic?

@Mark S.: LOL. It’s like a genetic marker, or a secret “Spidey Tracker”. As soon as you hear a certain word: “BENGHAZI! SOLYANDRA! SOROS! DELPHI!” you can immediately stop debating the person and instead go directly to mocking, because you can be sure the person you’re talking to has a case of Foxitus.

@JohnK: re: Ryan – really, everytime we give these assholes the benefit of the doubt we end up being wrong, see Mittens, 47% – his comments yesterday fully corroborate that video with his donors. You know, sometimes a spade is really a spade.

Re: Delphi and UN resolutions. I’ve heard all of this and much worse at my nearby target range. As a matter of fact, one of the ROs said to me the other day “you know, you can remove your ear protection during a cease fire”. I’ve learned to keep it on so I don’t have to listen to the vile, paranoid shit these guys spew. Hopeless.

Romney will never run for office again, and he’s never been a particularly loyal Republican party guy, so I can imagine he doesn’t care how stupid and damaging his remarks are to the already disgraced GOP brand. Ryan is just stupid as fuck.

I think people over-estimate how “winnable” the election was for Romney. If Obama wasn’t black and had to deal with all the racism bullshit, it’d have been closer to Reagan/Mondale with Romney playing the role of Mondale than the ‘mere trouncing’ he (Romney) suffered at the hands of Obama.

@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I don’t think the States have done anything about succession. What we have here are some severely cognitively challenged individuals acting out on their delusions filing BS on a well meaning White House web page designed to attract serious feedback. Is this real or is this just another sign of disrespect for the President?

I had a wet blanket thought this morning. All that shellshock, unskewed polls stuff probably saved the House for the GOP. I don’t think Republicans turn out if they understood reality.

I think gerrymandering played a role, as others have said, but I also think the Democrats failed to convey the importance of putting Nancy Pelosi back in the Speaker’s chair.

Particularly when the Republicans were going nuts with the Blunt Amendment and attacking Sandra Fluke, and then later with the comments about rape. The Democrats should have been pointing out the necessity of putting a woman in charge of the House, but I hardly heard anything about it.

It did look for awhile that the House might flip, but the generic congressional ballot polling moved back to the Republicans after the first debate. That indicates Obama’s bad night hurt the party downticket, but it doesn’t make sense. Why punish Pelosi for Obama’s stumble?

Answer: because the importance of electing Pelosi was not being pushed as hard as the importance of electing Obama.

All this urban stuff is dogwhistles. Talk show radio, Newsmax and all the other usual under the radar subjects are pushing stories that more than 100 percent of the vote in Cuyahoga county. See here for google search alone:

Someone here already hit the nail on the head, GOP policies do suck, but a lot of the grifters who work with and or Fox News and other right wing media understand how to fleece their masters by telling them what they want to hear.

The most dangerous people on the right are Scarborough and Frum because they do appear to get it and because they are considered “tolerable” because they appear on MSNBC. Mind you Scar and Frum are still wrong and dunderheads, but they at least understand how the grifters like Rove and Limbaugh have the GOP money guys all fooled.

Me – I try and watch Current as much as possible except for that awful Joy Behar stupidity.

Do you have any factual basis to backup your assertion on Gerrymanders because otherwise there is this from Jonathan Bernstein that is as contrary to your point.

The recognized problem with this study is that it assumes that districts weren’t already gerrymandered before the 2010 redistricting. They were, and 2010 just made it worse in several states.

The argument then becomes that Democratic voters tend to “self-gerrymander” since a lot of urban areas have a very high concentration of Dem voters. You could solve this with spoke-like districts that spread out Dem voters somewhat.

The whole thing about gerrymandering is that, for a fixed population in each district, you can either have very safe seats for your party or a lot of seats for your party but not both. It’s like financial leverage, and like financial leverage, if the numbers change in a slightly unexpected way you can be pretty badly fucked. In the long term, it’s not the House that’s going to be a problem; it’s the Senate, which has large gooper advantages baked in for good.

Enjoyed hearing the new talking points from the right wing realm in the teacher’s lounge yesterday. Surprise, surprise the Electoral College prevented Romney from winning. If EV’s were allocated by congressional district, the GooP would have won the Whiteman’s House.

This from teachers? How the bloody hell do they think EV allocation is determined? By picking numbered chits out of a fishbowl?

2 EVs per state for Senate representation (plus 2 for D.C. as granted in the 23rd Amendment*), and the remaining 436 are one per Congressional district (plus one for D.C.).

Amazing that these teachers can find their way to the school.

*Interesting tidbit is that D.C.’s population is already greater than Wyoming’s – if the population differential grows, it will be in the position of having less representation in the Electoral College than it would be entitled to if a state. From Amendment XXIII (emphasis added)

The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as the Congress may direct: A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State;

The whining from Romney and Ryan is just too satisfying. They seem genuinely surprised that spending a campaign shitting on minorities, women, union labor, environmentalists, and the poor, could have lost them an election.

This from teachers? How the bloody hell do they think EV allocation is determined? By picking numbered chits out of a fishbowl?

They’re not talking about where the number of EVs come from, they’re talking about allocating EVs to the candidates based on who wins the vote in each Congressional district, or proportionally based on the number of “D” or “R” congressional districts per state, or something similar — what Husted was proposing right after the election last week. In essence, whichever party has a majority in the House would pretty much automatically win the Presidency.

*Interesting tidbit is that D.C.’s population is already greater than Wyoming’s – if the population differential grows, it will be in the position of having less representation in the Electoral College than it would be entitled to if a state. From Amendment XXIII (emphasis added)

Wyoming is also the foremost example of how the electoral college overrepresents the small states. Each EV in Wyoming represents approximately 189,386 people.

Compare that to California, where despite having 55 EV, each one represents about 685,307 people.

None. I was going entirely on the word of guys like Barny Frank and stuff I was told by party people. That sort of bean counting is beyond my interest level as I’d have to have a lot of detail about specific precincts, how the voted last week and where they were in 08. Thats a hell of a lot of work.

So, the whiners are so sad that the Democratic candidates won because people who favor Democratic policies came out to vote for the Democratic candidates! At the same time, Republican candidates got votes from people who favor Republican policies, or who are fooled into thinking that Republican policies will favor them.

Funny, I thought that was how democracy was supposed to work. Keep that chicken thing going, guys, it’s bound to start working soon!!

Whether 4chan submitted them or not, the dead Enders are using the petitions as solace. I am sure you could find 25k idiots in each state to sign a petition to change the American flag to a picture of an empty chair hanging from a tree, stupidity knows no geographical bias.
There is no fact or fiction that the republicans will not cling to, to console themselves that history is not passing them by. There will be no realization, no modification or mollification of the ‘base’ or basest of their natures, there will be no change. This is the Republican Party until they have a permanent minority.

The problem with defending against the EVs-apportioned-by-Congressional-District idea is that a couple states — Nebraska and Maine I think — already do it. There’s no Constitutional barrier to it. If Ohio’s EVs had been apportioned that way this year, Romney would have gotten the lion’s share of the state’s votes.

Even putting any racist dogwhistles aside, I think Ryan’s comments are actually offensive towards the idea of democracy and the Dems should make the Repubs wear them for the next 4 years while pushing election reform.
He didn’t say the R’s lost because not enough of their base voted. He didn’t say the R’s lost because they couldn’t convince enough Urban voters to support them instead of the Dems (because honestly they never even tried).
He said the R’s lost because too many Urban voters voted. That’s just pure disdain for democracy and should make it obvious to anyone that the Republican Party’s entire election strategy is to prevent enough of the ‘wrong’ people from exercising their right to vote not to earn their votes.

I always find it amusing when the party of individual responsibility refuses to accept any responsibility for its loss.

Moar LULz.

The last few days have been a bit like 2009, but intensified. More than 27% of the people have truly lost what is left of their minds. And they aren’t just letting their freak flag fly, they are putting it on the Goodyear blimp with neon lights.

@Ash Can: Actually, judging from the Facebook Wingnut Barometer, half of all Republicans are saying that the Democrats won by giving free stuff to the moochers, and the other half are saying that the GOP really won but the Dems stole the election with CHICAGO STYLE POLITICS BENGHAZI.

@bjacques: That cracked me up so much :-) Right, I’ve had a nice lazy morning off so I am off to report back to FEMA HQ – ie my local foodbank where FEMA is carrying out its evil plot of feeding the hungry.

Here’s another problem for the GOP: Eighty percent of the human race lives in cities. Outside of Agriculture and Resource Extraction, most human wealth (and knowledge) is developed in cities. Even post-Sandy, a tightly-packed city like NYC has orders of magnitude more value per sq ft than any Red State in the union.

For all their big talk of ‘gifts’, much GOP domestic policy since at least 1980 has been driven by the impulse to extract wealth from the cities and give it to white flighters in the suburbs, to buy their votes. Starve the urban schools of funding, divert the funds to suburban whites. Favor essentially non-productive sectors like suburban construction over manufacturing. Starve urban infrastructure (including transportation) to favor roads out in the burbs.

I’ve come to think of the suburbs as a well-managed theme park for older white people, and it’s worked for some of them. But the nation as a whole can no longer afford the expense of maintaining that illusion for them. And as younger folks continue to move to the cities, the country will continue to become more and more urban. In this long term, this is a very good thing.

Cities are the future, and there’s really nothing the GOP can do to stop it.

@JohnK: I’m going to assume you’re not down playing racism as a reason why Money Boo Boo and Lyin’ Ryan lost, but racism is very much a fact-free delusion, one of the most destructive delusions there is.. It permeates the GOP at EVERY level and informs EVERYTHING they do. And it will ever be thus. So fuck those racist motherfuckers.

The problem with defending against the EVs-apportioned-by-Congressional-District idea is that a couple states—Nebraska and Maine I think—already do it. There’s no Constitutional barrier to it. If Ohio’s EVs had been apportioned that way this year, Romney would have gotten the lion’s share of the state’s votes.

The problem with this interpretation is that it assumes that the Obama campaign would not have adjusted & run differently. It was pretty finely tuned to the current EV situation. I have confidence that they would have had a strategy for the shifting EV world if that had been the case.

Its what made them different from Romney’s campaign; they didn’t just practice magical thinking, they assessed the obstacles & worked out ways around/over them.

I agree that most people overestimate the winnability of this thing for Mittens.

Actually, I’ll go one better and say it wouldn’t have been nearly as close without the voter suppression efforts. Voter information packages with the wrong dates on them in Florida and Arizona, machines turning Obama votes into Romney votes in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Republican “election monitors” unsubtly monitoring the proceedings, not to mention my one friend who mysteriously never got his absentee ballot.

Romney cheated with every trick in the book, and STILL it wasn’t enough to close the gap. That’s my takeaway from the election.

Once again, the Republicans have to look away from the obvious facts: Urban dwellers have to interact daily with a heterogenous group of people, and tend to realize that we are in this together. Rural society is very homogenous and its much easier to only interact with ‘your kind.’

The grand irony is that there are so many productive urban people who were driven away from their small towns because they are ‘different.’ Big cities, especially on the coasts, are the beneficiaries of this provincial bigotry.

@MosesZD: people who had a factual bent and followed the polling and polling aggregations and sites like 538 and Princeton Consortium instead of following their “guts” knew all the time that this election was never winnable for R/R

@Mark S.: Honestly, I think that the saddest thing about that – besides the fact that these are elected state officials – is that they invited only Republican legislators to that little session. I mean, come on. If they think it’s a threat and they’re convinced that there’s a stalinist mind control going on, they shouldn’t keep that to themselves. Shouldn’t they hire some kind of deprogrammer to snap the Democrats out of their zombie-stupor?

people who had a factual bent and followed the polling and polling aggregations and sites like 538 and Princeton Consortium instead of following their “guts” knew all the time that this election was never winnable for R/R

Yep.

The thing I don’t understand is, I followed the polls not because they were telling me liberal things but because I wanted to have some idea of what was coming – if Romney was going to win, I wanted to have an inkling ahead of time so I wouldn’t be caught shell-shocked on election night and then flip a shit like they’ve been doing right now.

Yes, but if you allow us Republicans to design the Presidential voting system each time so as to specifically benefit Republicans, then we will win, and any other way is clearly unfair and un-Constitutional, no matter what the Constitution may say.